Feds found Silk Road 2 servers after a six-month attack on Tor?

Re:Feds found Silk Road 2 servers after a six-month attack o... by Zikes on Wednesday January 21, 2015 @05:09PM (#8926126)

Every rational actor has that preference, but not that expectation. I'm well aware that my ISP can eavesdrop on everything that happens over their network, and can extend that ability to any party they choose.

I agree that there is no moral distinction between a title 3 wiretap and Tor infiltration, however a title 3 wiretap is a passive listener while this Tor infiltration is not. The nature of the Tor infiltration caused anonymity to be stripped and readable by anyone aware of the flaw. They used resources unavailable to others to expose that information not only for themselves but to everyone.

The equivalent would be streaming a title 3 wiretap sans filter to everyone on the internet.

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Re:Feds found Silk Road 2 servers after a six-month attack o... by tptacek on Wednesday January 21, 2015 @05:21PM (#8926191)

If you go through the exercise of building a mental model of exactly what a title 3 wiretap facility on a packet-switched telephony network looks like, and then carefully study the covert channel traffic confirmation attack the Tor team disclosed and everyone presumes the FBI is using, you'll see that the technical differences are not that great. It's certainly not as black-and-white as "passive" versus "active".

I'm not sure I follow the point about how the FBI could have done grave damage to everyone's privacy. It's (hypothetically, assuming this is how the FBI did it) the relay-early traffic confirmation vulnerability that did that. The FBI didn't create that vulnerability.

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Re:Feds found Silk Road 2 servers after a six-month attack o... by tedunangst on Wednesday January 21, 2015 @05:15PM (#8926163)

Perhaps you need to update your expectations? Merely expecting Tor to be secure does not make it so.

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